Barry Schwartz: Our Loss of Wisdom [video]

Was talking to a friend about the current state of Malaysia, and it just depresses me. Yes. It has that effect on me. And then I chanced upon this video and though it's only loosely related, it's inspiring. Sharing this here so I, too, can re-watch it another day, when I need it. Enjoy!

Watch: Teddy's Operation

In light of surgery clerkship, here's a video to share. Depending on what kind of person you are, you'll either find it disturbing, or funny, or *insert your own adjective here*. Enjoy! :)

Dumb Ways To Die

Video is super cute, can't resist sharing!

 

Study Break

This is one of my favorite songs that has been on loop during the heme-onc block:

This is a nerd version of that song that's just priceless. Hilarious! Enjoy:

Cowboys vs. Pit Crews

"We have trained, hired, and rewarded people to be cowboys. But it's pit crews that we need, pit crews for patients." - Atul Gawande

If you haven't read his book 'The Checklist Manifesto', watching this video kinda sums it up. But if you ask me, I say you should read the book nonetheless. That and the other 2 books before that. His writing is clean and crisp, and he's a great storyteller. And if you're in the health care industry, you'll love the books even more. Enjoy!

An Interview Worth Watching

Some time ago I saw this interview about science, evolution and universe etc. with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, by Stephen Colbert. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, and the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Peace; while Stephen Colbert as we all know, is a political satirist and, among other roles, the host of The Colbert Report. 

When I first watched it, I remember having many thoughts running through my mind, but unfortunately I didn't write them down, so they're long gone by now. But! I really think people should watch it. Anyone with the slightest interest about science, universe and/or society should watch it, it provides food for thought, and if for nothing else, watch it for the humor. :)  So if you have some time, watch it. Enjoy! 

TED Talk on Education

Many of you may agree that our education system today isn't doing a great job educating our young ones, and something must be done. This TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson pointed out the problems of our education system today, and urged those who have the ability to make a change do something. I personally think that even if you're not in the position to make a major difference, this 18-minute video may still benefit you, because who knows, it may change the way you educate your kids in the future. Enjoy!

Symmetry

Watch this, it'll put a smile on your face. :)  I found it on Radiolab's website. 

Sweet as Honey and Warm as Sunshine

I promise you, these videos are of the cutest little kids I've ever seen, the first one reciting a poem - Litany, by Billy Collins, and the latter, a french girl telling her cutest (albeit a little morbid) fairytale that tickles your heart. if you're having a bad day, spend the next six and a half minutes to watch this, it will cheer you up. :)

Noteworthy Reads 2/19/10

As usual, my browser has ten thousands tabs opened - stuff i wanna read but will have to wait. here are a few:

1. Bill Gate's talk on TED conference: on energy and zero carbon emission. this matter is critical to our future generation but i feel it's not gaining enough public attention.
2. Also another TED talk by Mae Jemison: on arts, science and education. i haven't watched this video, but reading what Garr Reynolds have to say about it makes me wanna watch it.
3. If you're into photography, you probably have already come across these two websites: (1) Stuck in Customs; and (2) Light Stalking (courtesy of Brandon for sharing). Great resources to start learning, or just to enjoy some really good pictures.

That's all for now. No health care stuff this week. But there's going to be a conference meeting with the President on the Feb 25, so hopefully they will come to a conclusion and pass the friggin' bill.

Fat Talk

i was about to go off on a rant on how people here are eating way too much junk food, fast food etc. for their own good, but i realized i have stacks of reading materials and coursework to do, so i'll just keep it short and post up a video that inspired me to go on a rant in the first place. since i'm not ranting anymore, i'll just share with you Jamie Oliver's talk on fighting obesity during the TED Conference 2010.

really. i think we all eat too much sometimes. me included. -___-  should really start practicing abstinence... before i turn into one fat glob who can't do anything else but, uhm, eat more (i guess?!).

The Fringe Benefits of Failure

i can't remember the exact dates, but sometime last week TED conference 2010 was held in Palm Springs. my twitterfeed was filled with attendees and speakers alike spooling out their take in 140 characters throughout the 3-day conference. guess how much it is to attend that conference. no don't guess. i'll tell you. 7k! good grief. anyway. since i couldn't go, i had to resort to their website for updates and talks. but in the midst of it, i found this video - JK Rowling giving a commencement speech at Harvard. it's inspiring and funny, so i thought i'd share it. but even more so is the mere fact that i'd like to keep a log of what struck a chord in me, or what i thought is worth revisiting in the future. trust me, it's definitely worth the 20 minutes of your life, simply because the underlying message is timeless. if for any reason you can't watch it, or prefer to read the transcript, it is included as well. (the red fonts are bits that spoke out to me or that i resonated with). enjoy!

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement.

Text as delivered follows.
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination. These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools. What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown. Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. 

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone. Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read. And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life. Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives. Thank you.

Never Too Early

Never too early to start counting down to this year's Christmas, right?! :D hehehehe. i like their rendition of 12 days of Christmas. :) Enjoy!

Ophiuchus, Stem Cells, Grand Canyon, & Sedona (Arizona Part 3)

Saturday, April 12, 2008 & Sunday, April 13, 2008

First half of the day was more presentations, including poster presentations. Again, some were really interesting stuff but some were a little below par of what was expected. Did you know that there's the 13th astrological sign called Ophiuchus, also known as Serpentarius? Neither did i. It was said this sign was never included in the Zodiac chart because astrologers said the sun traveled straight from Scorpio to Sagittarius, disregarding the fact that the sun actually traveled to Ophiuchus for 19 days before entering Sagittarius (whatever that means... i don't even know how the zodiac chart came about). So apparently it falls between Nov 30 and Dec 17. (Heyy!! Ain't that date look familiar??? oh yaaa it's my birthday! :P) soooo. i'm an Ophiuchian now? hahah coool. Here are the descriptions of Ophiucian's attributes(source: love-astrology.com):

1. Many people are envious of this subject as he progresses well throughout life. (urghh, yeah bad memories in primary school. :( but at least now i don't think there is anyone out there envious of me?!)
2. A seeker of wisdom and knowledge. (yes yes, that's me... but!! the trait of faineance in me must be from some other sign... :/)
3. Many people are jealous of this person. (isn't this a repeat of #1..?! who wrote this. questionable source hmmm.)
4. Tends to go for the more flamboyant in dress sense, favouring bright colours. (Nonsense! i always wear plain color shirts, always black white or blue. ...... ok lah i admit. i love bright colors too; if only i had a hot bod, i'd wear them. but if you're such a fat pig, why draw attention to yourself by wearing bright colors right. that would be dumb. and i'm not. :P)
5. Authority looks upon him well. (uhhh. yet to be proven..)
6. Would make a great architect or builder. (uhmm. i can build a home if and when i find my perfect man?! :PPPP hahah doth that count??)
7. Number 12 is this person's lucky number. (if i ever go to casino, i'll play roulette with only this number. then i'll let you know if it's true)
8. This person will have a big family but leave home at an early age. (wait 10 years from now and i'll tell you if i have a big family :P but the latter part is true though, for me)

p.s. why did the author of the above descriptions wrote all of that with the pronoun ‘he’? did the author mean to just target the male Ophiuchians and so they wouldn’t be applicable to me? Or is the author a sexist?! i wonder.

Well the reason I talked bout it is cuz it was one of the poster presentations. There was this other oral presentation that I didn’t mention in the previous post. This girl was talking about going to Mars and all how fast we can get to Mars as opposed to how fast Superman can. Or something of the like, I can’t really remember. But she gave some really wrong facts to which my professor kept shaking his head at, because he’s an astrophysicist and he was horrified and appalled that an honors student gave a presentation before confirming the validity of her resources. Anyway, of all the data and stats that she gave, I only remember this - she said it takes only 3 days for us to get from Earth to Mars! (by what means, i don't remember. some super lightspeed spaceship maybe) Really?? That’d be a milestone for the humankind if we could do that, and i'd be the fist to sign up when they have the first ever space tour!! If only. Wishful thinking..

stem cells! Oooh the guy who gave the keynote speech is a guy doing stem cell research and who wrote a book too. Christopher something. I can’t recall his name and I don’t have my notebook with me. Will tell you guys in the next few posts – if I remember. But no I wasn’t gonna delve into the topic of stem cells (well I was, at that time of the speech, but now I’m just too lazy to get into it); instead I wanted to show you guys a video clip. Now let me just see how I can post it up.

Yeah! Success! :) managed to put it up. see we get to eat cheesecake before lunch! hehehe. i thought that was coool. with the frozen choc fudge and all that. i took a picture of me trying to drink the fudge, but it was deleted . :( and you heard my friend Gregory - after this we're hitting the road to grand canyon, but before that stopping by a few places! it's gonna be exciting!! :)

If you're wondering, we didn't hike the half-mile trail... cuz some of us were worried we can't get to the grand canyon in time to catch the sunset. we did, in the end, but not without lots of tantrums, swearing... but it's funny, and it definitely is a source of amusement (to me, at least).

anddddd...tah-dah! may i present you the grand canyon!! :) this is my first! yeppp! gave it to the honors college! when mom and dad come, we'll be heading there again! yayyy. :) p.s. the place where we were standing at is called Grandview of Grand Canyon. what a sight!! grand view indeed. ;)

Sedona! its a town some 2 hrs away from Flagstaff, where the conference was at. A cutsie little town there they sell all the touristy stuff - cost a bomb, but hard to resist. so many times i filled my arms with all that i wanted, made it halfway across to the counter only to force myself back and return those items onto their racks, to which i feel is doing them injustice, cuz they should be with me, where they belong... :P but apparently the numbers in my back account don't agree on that. :/ pictures, coming up!

Gregory with his eyes closed, me, Raniel, Natalie, and Eric. :)

Don't know what they are, but i thought they looked colorful. don't they? i likey!

the plates =) aren't they pretteee :) i want one of those tea cups you see at
the very bottom right. and i shall drink hot cocoa from it every winter night.

Sedona has trolley bus! it's called.... Sedona Trolley. aint that something. :P

i wanna get a dog!!! just because in this Three Dogs Bakery they sell
the cutest pastries for dogs, and i wanna buy them for my dog! i know,
it doesn't make any sense, does it! and i'm animaliaphobic!!! go figure..

That's me trying to quench my thirst. god knows how long i stood there
and yet still felt thirsty. geez. puzzles me every time i look at this pic. :PP

That's about it for this trip. We went to Sedona the next day after grand canyon day. Left sedona and took the flight back to Ontario, CA. all in all, a very fun trip, getting to know some friends, teasing each other, weaving some memories etc.

The Three Stoogers. :) my best friends during the trip. fun people.

A Video Clip to Share

Found this on another guy's blog, thought it's worth sharing. A song titled 'Dreams', inspired by hurricane Katrina.

Illusions of the Media

Sorry I haven't been writing lately. But here's an update. :) Last Thursday I attended a talk by one of our Communications Department professors Dr. Jane Ballinger at the Recreation Center in the Uni Village. 'Twas a very interesting topic; I've learnt some shocking truth... and if you may, rather horrifying too, and so I thought it'd be nice to share with y'all.

Nowadays people don't watch TV much anymore, and even when they do, the majority ignores the advertisements. So how do the advertising companies promote their clients' products? The solution lies in something called product placement, which is, really quite effective, especially on the vulnerable teenage minds in this era. Check this out.


Have you personally been influenced by it too, perhaps unconsciously? Or have you noticed it amongst your friends, how they talked bout what Beyonce is wearing in her newest music video or how Lindsay Lohan's new look is so fabulous, and that they'd kill to get their hands on "something like that" or even look like that?


Are you one of the "victims" too? Or are you one of those who realize all these yet don't mind being their prey?

Some may argue that there's nothing wrong with product placement because there will be products being used in the movies anyway, so why not make those companies sponsor the products (and the movies) since featuring their products is definitely gonna boost their sales? It's a win-win situation, no? Or, is there an ethical issue at stake? Because when you accept privileges from one party, all the competitors of the similar products have to do is offer you more, to get you to use their products instead! To the point where personal interests come into picture, i.e. bribery,... hence the ethical issue. Then what? Something for you to ponder. :)

Then there are the other stuff apart from product placement. Not sure if you guys have heard of fake news, but its a kinda PR approach to advertise for their products, and it's done through video news release (aka VNRs) - which is made by the product companies itself AND THEN distributing those VNRs to news stations for free! Which means, sometimes what you watch ain't really 'news' but just commercials that are made in the form of news!!! Here's an example of VNR, check it out if you have time. - http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/vnr1

After reading these, you'd wonder, so when do we know what to believe and what not to believe? Which part of the news are true anymore? Even if it's world news, how are we supposed to know that they didn't edit parts of the video footage so that it'd be interpreted by the viewers the way they want them to? Believe it or not, perception is reality. And! It's one thing when companies send short clips of their products to news stations to be put as news, so that people would wanna buy them. But it's another when government do the same to spread their propaganda, i.e. to make you believe there is a war worth fighting or that certain group/association is bad and are terrorizing the world so we should all fight against them!! It's one thing to advertise in the movies cuz we're more or less aware of it, but to do it in the news - it's just impossible for us to know what's the truth anymore.

And then of course, there are the high tech adobe photoshop editing and all the makeup products in the world not to mention the perfumes, colognes... that can change almost any pictures of an ugly looking pimple popping pig into a beautiful soft-skinned tan swan.


"No Wonder Our Perception of Beauty is Distorted." How true. There's really no one out there in real life who will look perfect as they are in the magz. Those are just marketing gimmicks to make you wanna buy the newest/coolest make-up product (or anythg else) on the shelf. Strangely enough, we live in a world where majority actually don't mind succumbing to the commercial manipulation and being sucked into the world of consumerism.


"Thank God Our Perception of Beauty is Distorted." Good point! XD ahahahaaa. Ah well, we live in a contradictory world.